The web browser is rapidly becoming an important venue for reaching and interacting with consumers. For example, electronic commerce, or ecommerce, has become a significant, if not primary, revenue source for many retailers of products and services. Web sites and online content providers are now competing with traditional broadcast and cable networks to deliver media content to audiences across all demographics. Increasingly, advertisers are paying to embed advertisements in commonly-accessed web sites. Through web browser usage monitoring, insight into the habits and preferences of online consumers can be gained. Armed with this insight, retailers, content providers, advertisers, etc., can adapt their online presence to improve their reach and interaction with consumers.
Many conventional web browser monitoring techniques require one or more software applications to be installed and executed on the computer (or, more generally, computing device) implementing the monitored web browser. Additionally, these resident software applications may require access to the network infrastructure providing network connectivity for the monitored computer to report monitored data to a central data collection facility. However, many businesses and commercial enterprises, and even some individuals, are reluctant to have such third-party applications installed and executed on their computers. This reluctance can stem from specific concerns regarding increased risks of viruses or incompatibilities with existing software configurations, to more general concerns about the increased amount of person-hours needed to support the additional software application(s) running on the enterprise's computer network(s).